Re: OT: This is why there are "denialists"...

John Larkin wrote:
On Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:47:34 +0100, Martin Brown
<|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:02:28 -0700,
"JosephKK"<quiettechblue@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:57:45 +0100, Eeyore
<rabbitsfriendsandrelations@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:

Class warfare is like any warfare... it destroys all the players.
So kill the rich vs poor class system them.

Graham
Brits are a fine group to talk. They still cannot stop creating class
systems.
If Karl Marx had lived in Chicago instead of London, he would have
written some very different books.
Not really. I suspect the hard bitten Victorian era industrialists in the US were every bit as big and bad and nasty as their UK counterparts.

But interaction with industrialists is mostly voluntary.

Yes. They could volunteer to starve to death or work for what the mill or mine owners were prepared to pay them. People went to work in the cities because life in the countryside for the landless poor was *even* worse. You can still be transported to Australia for poaching a rabbit after dark today (parts of the law were never repealed).

And the US
was giving big chunks of land - permament ownership - to anyone
willing to farm or mine it. Game and fish were plentiful and free...

You had a surfeit of natural resources.

poaching wasn't necessary. And we had no king, no lords, no hereditary
seats in government, no distinct classes (except for natives and
slaves), far less poverty than England, not much in the way of
colonies,and we mostly tried to keep out of wars.

Yes. You do have classes. The ruling moneyed super rich political class whose ancestors were former sugar and cotton plantation slave owners and their bankers for instance. Then came the oilmen, mine owners and industrialists. Most recently Bill Gates. It is a slightly more dynamic class system that is all. New money is looked down on in the UK although the aristocracy are keen enough to marry their daughters into it if there is enough to be worthwhile.

It was the US civil war 1861-5 halting raw cotton exports that had the Lancashire cotton workers starving and indirectly assisted the formation of the TUC. It also helped to boost the indigenous linen industry for a while.

The British landlord system was grotesque - useless twits owned the
land and drank/wenched/hunted foxes while the workers owned nothing
and paid rent.
Not true. Your description is a parody of the real situation.

Read some Jane Austen, Scott, Dickens, or some real history of the
time.

You really need to learn to distinguish between fact and fiction. You will be telling me next about the marvelously "authentic" Cockney accent of *** van Dyke in Mary Poppins. That well known film about life in Victorian England with levitating nannies, runs on the bank and all.

I have a fair degree of expertise in the early history of the iron & steel industry and glass making in the UK. I have provided information and helped find original documents for historical researchers in the past. You might find the description of one of the worst industrial accidents 6th Oct 1854 in Gateshead interesting reading (happens to be online in Google Books). It was a long while afterwards before storage of wildly incompatible materials in the same warehouse was banned.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3aYDAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA291&dq=newcastle+town+council+minutes+explosion&ei=DT9KSvq0O5HSNZD2qMMH

The little people at the bottom of the heap really didn't matter. They don't get to vote unless they own sufficient land and none of them did.

There was an underclass of manual workers in the industrial revolution. They also drank/wenched, ate poorly and died young of tuberculosis. Life was pretty good for the emerging middle classes and merchants though.

And there were some notable family firms that are still global brands today who did treat their workers fairly. Cadbury, Bournville and Pilkington being obvious examples (usually but not always Quaker).

I suppose "some" and "emerging" weren't enough to placate Marx, or
Dickens for that matter. Marx's objections were plenty valid; but he
didn't really understand technology or economics, or even human
nature, so his methods were all wrong.

No. He had a very good point. Unbridled capitalism in the industrial revolution had exploited the poor mercilessly and made sure they did not benefit at all from their labours. They had to work hard and die young for a pitance.

It was only in *1998* that the UK passed a minimum wage bill. Prior to that employers could pay however little they could get away with (and some still do).

The few places where something was done to redress the balance were curiously enough free trade measures started in Manchester to get the Corn Laws repealed in 1849 (a struggle of about 30 years). The Corn Laws were a form of price maintainence scheme to ensure that the urban poor could not buy food cheaply even in years of surplus.

Parliament eventually moved to bring the 70 hour working week down to 55 hours in 1847 as they feared a mass uprising of the oppressed working classes if something wasn't done to improve their lot.

The choices for the average worker was work for the piece rate that the bosses set or starve. Rates were never good and the life expectancy for the men working in some of the nastier jobs like fettling castings was about 40 if they were lucky. If you are serious about actually knowing something about the development of Victorian industry in the UK I suggest you take a look for the book by Lady Florence Bell (a dogooder and wife of one of the more benevolent founders of the Iron & Steel industry) called "At the works".

http://www.amazon.co.uk/At-Works-Study-Manufacturing-Middlesbrough/dp/0860684156

Engels also gave a pretty good and much earlier description of the slum areas of Manchester and Salford in the 1840's. He was a manager at the Victoria Cotton Mill by day and investigated the plight of the English working classes by night. His book "The Condition of the Working Class in England" was in German and only became available in English translation about half a century later. It was still relevant - things did not improve so long as the workers remained divided and weak.

http://www.cottontimes.co.uk/engelso.htm
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0192836889

I suspect that the only difference in America was that the urban poor were (and still are) out of sight and out of mind. Some of your industrialists were a bit more enlightened about paying workers enough that they would also be consumers too. Although ISTR you did have a spot of bother with monopolistic practices and Robber Barons.

Regards,
Martin Brown
.

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